routines and relationships, museum style

In a recent guest post on Nina Simon’s blog Museum 2.0, Laurel Butler, Education Specialist at the Yerba Buena Center from the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco, talked about a program that the YBCA recently piloted called YOU Membership. Participants in the program enter into a close relationship with the YBCA, whose staff basically serves as the museum equivalent of personal trainers. Seriously: being a YOU Member means that you have professionals evaluate your interests and needs in order to recommend a “museum routine” designed to deepen your involvement with the institution and extend the benefits you reap from that involvement. From the point of view of the visitor, I see two major benefits of participating in the program. First, instead of having to sift through all offered programs and events, you are automatically directed toward the ones that should be of highest interest to you. Second, you get lots of one-on-one interaction with museum insiders. 

As someone profoundly interested in ways in which the museum can make its interpretive processes more transparent to the public and privilege the voices of its visitors, this kind of initiative seems like a giant leap in the right direction. Still, considering the fact that YBCA continues to struggle with getting YOU Members to participate in the programming recommended to them, I can’t help but wonder if their efforts aren’t somewhat misdirected. Instead of spending a lot of time customizing visits for an intimate group of people, would the YBCA be better advised to focus on attracting wider audiences to the museum by proposing alternative ways of experiencing its collection?

I’ve been mulling over a few possibilities for using technology and the web to extend the appeal of the museum visit to a larger public. The first is some type of printed resource or website that treats the meta of the museum by demystifying the inner workings of the institution. This would be designed to the give the audience a better sense of what goes into constructing and maintaining a museum, and what decisions are made by various museum professionals. Knowing where the authority lies and where interpretation enters the mix in any decision-making process can empower one to challenge the end product, and I think people willing to spend a bit of time familiarizing themselves with the ins and outs of museum work would begin to feel much more comfortable calling into question the meaning and value of things they encounter in the museum of art. If this type of revelatory information could exist in museums themselves as interactive displays, I think the effects would be revolutionary.

The second idea resembles something like craigslist for museums. Not a social networking site per se, but a place to connect with people offering a service that you need, this could be a way for educators and museum visitors to connect in an informal way. Not only could museums advertise their exhibitions and programs, but they could learn about the desires of their visitors, and visitors could find peers with shared interests with which to visit museums, attend events, and debrief museum experiences.